Re: pgAdmin vs. the competition - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

> On Sunday 30 March 2008 23:35, Tatsuo Ishii wrote:
> > > I think crossplatform development doesn't help on this issue. And
> > > wxWidgets seems, well, less interesting (in the UI) than Qt for example.
> > >
> > > > Whenever PostgreSQL is busy the UI fails to
> > > > give any clue, no icon changes to a spinning hourglass, no status bar
> > > > filling up, not even a mindless pop-up saying "busy...".  This is
> > > > painfully obvious when doing a BACKUP or RESTORE.
> > >
> > > For the backup/restore stuff, I don't think pgAdmin can actually do
> > > something better. We heavily rely on pg_dump/pg_restore. Any other UI
> > > tool would need to do the same.
> > >
> > > > And even when either
> > > > task completes, the UI/text doesn't do much to even let me know it
> > > > worked.  In fact it just re-enables the buttons again, where at first
> > > > I'd click them and it would try to do the backup/restore again, which
> > > > really made me believe the whole operation failed."
> > >
> > > Which lets me think he doesn't use the latest build (1.8).
> > >
> > > > I forward this along not to pick on pgAdmin, which is hampered in
> > > > particular by being so cross-platform which Microsoft doesn't have to
> > > > worry about, but to point out this is a not particularly obvious way
> > > > PostgreSQL comparisions sometimes fail.  This is not even close to the
> > > > first time I've heard comments about how large the distance is between
> > > > pgAdmin and the SQL Manager software in particular is, just the first
> > > > time I could share the report.
> > > >
> > > > Something to chew on for those thinking about development resource
> > > > allocation...
> > >
> > > I completely agree on this. pgAdmin is really far far far away from SQL
> > > Manager. But they have many more developers than us, and they don't have
> > > to handle crossdevelopment. We need to show our differences : remote
> > > configuration, Slony support, etc. Adding pgPool, pgPool-II and
> > > pgBouncer support would be great and is something I would like to add as
> > > soon as possible.
> >
> > pgpool-II provides convenient interfaces to manage pgpool-II. "PCP
> > commands" is a set of commands to control pgpool-II. You could, for
> > example, get status of pgool, attach/detach DB nodes etc. See
> > http://pgpool.projects.postgresql.org/#reference for more details.
> > Actually pgpoolAdmin(A web based pgpool-II control GUI) uses these
> > commands to control pgpool-II.
> >
> > If you prefer to use C libraries, rather than UNIX commands, you could
> > use libpcp, an C functions control pgpool-II. PCP commands actually
> > are made on top of libpcp.
> >
> > If you have questions, please let me know or you could send questions
> > on pgpool ML (http://pgfoundry.org/mail/?group_id=1000055)
>
> Actually I always wondered why you built additional interfaces, rather than
> working with the existing pgadmin and phppgadmin projects. I suspect there
> might be some design issues that made it more difficult, but I'm not sure.

Well at the time when pgpool-II was born (2006), I was not very
convinced pgpool-II would be accepted by users and
community. Fortunately a sponsor gave us money to create a UI for
pgpool-II (pgpoolAdmin), we decided to make UI by ourselves.
--
Tatsuo Ishii
SRA OSS, Inc. Japan